Website and e-marketing for the UK's number one visitor attraction
I worked with Alton Towers Resort for over eight years.
My role was to provide technical project management and development team leadership and be part of the digital marketing team.
We were appointed by the Resort in 2009 to bring their brand to life online, and to deliver a CMS that allowed the business to maximise theme park and hotel revenues online. We built the Alton Towers Resort website on the Ektron CMS platform - I led the development team and worked directly with the Alton Towers Marketing team, based within the grounds of Alton Towers.
Since the first website launch, I worked with the commercial director and closely with the client as an extension of their marketing team. We created social media campaigns, interactive content and email marketing campaigns. Further briefs have included the online launch of new attractions such as Th13teen, Nemesis Sub-Terra and The Smiler.
As Ektron became a discontinued product in the UK, we later redesigned and rebuilt the site. I led the team in the creation of the new site within Umbraco 8.
Working for Alton Towers was classic agency work. All software developments were managed myself using scrum, marketing projects were planned in advance and managed within defined sprints and all reactive work was performed depending on the current project, which could be something that needs doing for the weekend because of changes in the weather etc.
Zoho Projects was used to manage the team collaboratively.
In the time that we have worked with the UK's number one visitor attraction, annual unique visitors to the website had increased from 3.5 million to over 11 million.
"We have worked together for several years, during which time traffic across our websites has increased exponentially. The development teams role in this and the value of their ongoing support can't be overestimated." - Katherine Duckworth, Head of Sales and Marketing, Alton Towers Resort
Escape
One particular "fantastically" successful social media campaign was "Escape" which had members of the public nominating their town to be visited by the Alton Towers "party bus" to take winners for a free day at the park. The concept was devised and managed by myself and during a 5 week period, the Alton Towers Facebook page gained over 45,000 "comments and follows" and we added 15000 email contact details to the marketing email list.
Email Marketing
As mentioned above, our team was responsible for all Email Marketing, we would work with the marketing team creating planned emails, as well as ad-hoc reactive campaigns.
Emails would be designed in by our in-house designer, email code would be created by hand by myself, I would also manage and broadcast the email and contact list using bespoke email campaign software called "MailManager247" which I built.
The Website and Digital Marketing were discontinued and brought into Merlin, the parent company to be managed in-house.
